Some guys have a mid-life crisis and buy a Porsche. I buy cassettes off of tapeheadcity.com . A cheap fix and a great way to listen to tunes. I'd forgotten how nice it was to plug into a Walkman and have a listening experience without driving everyone around me crazy with my taste in music. I put fresh AA batteries in the Walkman 10 days ago and have been listening pretty much non-stop - no slow down or distortion of playback so far. Of course fast forward and rewind don't work on a 41-year-old tape player - the plastic gears that govern those functions tend to become brittle and break over time and are hard to replace. I'm okay with that, it still sounds killer and the tape hiss kind of matches the frequency of my tinnitus. Stay tuned for more tape fun!